Apple iOS developers spend most of their time coding. Android developers? They use the bulk of their time testing and debugging their code, according to an Evans Data report.

This isn't because Android developers must compensate for poor code with increased QA, or that iOS developers are blasé about code quality. Rather, it's due to Android fragmentation, which forces developers to spend more time testing disparate hardware, a problem no other mobile platform has.

Making matters worse, iOS developers make more money, on average, than their Android peers.

What's an Android developer to do?

Different Platforms, Different Schedules

The platforms developers choose will guide where they spend the majority of their time, as an Evans Data survey of 400 mobile developers suggests.

Among those surveyed, more Android developers (36%) say testing and debugging is the most time consuming phase of development than any other group. By contrast, the largest group of iOS developers (31%) say they spend most of their time doing actual coding. For developers targeting Windows Phone, it’s the design phase.

Coders want to code, so why do they spend so much time testing and debugging with Android?

Given that there are over 1,600 devices in the Android SDK, it's not surprising Android developers must spend an inordinate amount of time testing and debugging. That's a heck of a lot of hardware and software configurations to QA.

And while Android co-founder Rich Miner has called Android fragmentation "an overblown issue," it's hard to look at this visualization noted on the Droid Report and not recognize the impact it has on developers:

For iOS developers, of course, there's far less fragmentation, as the company has (over)stated on its developer site.

Apple's simple pie chart isn't a true apples-to-apples comparison with Android's, in part because it doesn't account for different iDevices running the various operating system versions. Still, the point is made: iOS developers deal with far less fragmentation and so get to spend more time on their code.

But wait, it gets worse.

The iOS Piggybank

To add insult to injury, iOS developers make more on average than their Android peers, as VisionMobile highlights:

Still, as The Guardian's Charles Arthur illustrates, while Android volumes should favor developers sprinting to that platform, the money still tends to flow toward the platform with users that spend more on apps:

[F]ollow the money—a big factor for the important developers, who can easily spend thousands writing a new app.... Distimo and analyst firm CCS Insight launched their App Vu Global service in early April 2012, tracking downloads and revenues from the app stores. Its initial findings claimed that Apple's App Store is generating $5.4m every day in app sales for the top 200 grossing iPhone and iPad apps. For Google Play, their estimate was just $679,000 for the top 200 grossing apps on Google Play, or about 12% of Apple's revenue.

This isn't quite as good as it looks. As VisionMobile finds, 50% of iOS developers and 64% of Android developers are below the "app poverty line" of $500 per app per month. So it's not as if iOS developers are driving around their Bentleys while Android developers settle for old Pintos.

But if Android development is more onerous and less profitable, why do developers still bother?

The Language Trap

For many developers, especially those in Asia-Pacific where Android is far and away the most dominant mobile platform, there's simply no other choice. And once that choice is made, it's hard to back out of it, given language constraints:

Yet there's still hope.

As VisionMobile uncovers in its Developer Economics Q3 2014 report, a "surprisingly high 47% of iOS developers and 42% of Android developers are using something other than the native language on their platforms." Not exclusively, and not necessarily as their primary development language. But "something else" keeps creeping into their apps.

Quite often, that "something other" is HTML5, which many developers use to build core functionality into their apps so that this core can be used across different platforms (e.g., both Android and iOS), then they wrap it in and extend it with native code for those different platforms.

This doesn't give Android developers an easy out, of course, as they still need to test and debug apps that must perform on a dizzying array of hardware and software configurations. And it says nothing of the buying behaviors of Android users.

But HTML5 could help to lower their overall development costs while also making it easier to dally with iOS as they wait for Android to catch up in terms of well-heeled app buyers. That's a strategy worth trying.

Demand, meet supply. The world is in dire need of millions of Internet of Things developers within the next few years. The good news? According to a new Evans Data survey, 17% the world's software developers are already working on IoT applications; those in the Asia-Pacific region are particularly active.

The bad news? This developer population doesn't have a strong history of software and cloud services innovation.

Asia-Pacific: A Hotbed Of Activity

To reprise: Evans Data's recent global survey of over 1,400 software developers found that 17% are working on applications for connected devices for IoT, while an additional 23% expect to begin work on them in the next 6 months. Given that so much of the world's electronics are produced in Asia-Pacific, it's perhaps not surprising that it's the region with the most aggressive IoT developers.

In fact, nearly 23% of APAC developers are currently developing software for Internet of Things. Only 20% of APAC developers say that they have no such plans, compared to 36% in North America and 49% in EMEA.

But the real question for APAC developers is whether they'll repeat their errors of the past few decades: building great hardware and neglecting to connect that hardware with software and services. Sensors, it turns out, are somewhat pointless.

More Devices, More Connected

The number of 'things'—30 billion devices connected to the Internet by 2020, according to Gartner, compared to 7.3 billion personal devices—is impressive but not the real story. Soon enough, as Gartner suggests, these devices "will ... be able to procure services such as maintenance, cleaning, repair, and even replacement on their own." They will be able to interact without human intervention, creating all sorts of possibilities, not to mention security vulnerabilities.

Developers are making this happen, developers that believe in and are helping to shape a connected future:

Due to the convergence of cloud, embedded systems, real-time event processing and even cognitive computing, developers are blessed with a perfect storm of low-cost devices and the ability to intelligently connect them. That in turn will yield revenue-generating services, which is where the real IoT money is.

Opening Up The Internet Of Things In APAC

While 31% of developers associate the Internet of Things with cloud computing, according to the Evans Data survey, the connections that bring device data to the cloud are much more important. As Intel Internet of Things business leader Ton Steenman complains, companies currently spend 90% of their IoT budgets "stitching things together," when that number should be closer to 10%.

APAC hasn't traditionally been good at such "stitching."

That stitching is hard both because developers haven't trusted third-party networks to carry their device data, but also because connectivity hasn't been built into devices and sensors at the pace needed, as data from Berg Insight suggests:

• Wireless connectivity has been incorporated into just 1/3 of point-of-sales terminals sold in 2013

• 27% of ATMs in North America are connected to cellular networks while only 5% to 10% are connected in Europe

• The number of "oil and gas" devices with cellular connectivity hovered at 93,000 in 2013 but will jump to 263,000 new units by 2018

There are signs that this is changing, particularly in APAC, which was an early pioneer in mobile communications. Just looking at the prevalence of connected smart electricity meters, APAC has the lead, despite lagging considerably in 2011.

Companies in APAC have struggled to build compelling software (e.g., Sony smartphone interfaces) or cloud services (e.g., Samsung cloud sync and back-up services). While this is changing, it's an open question whether APAC will be able to take the lead in developing connected experiences across devices.

One place to start is by opening up APIs.

As Rob Wyatt argues, "It is the open, local API that is missing from the Internet of Things." To make the it work anywhere, and particularly in Asia-Pacific, it's not enough for "vendors ... to provide dumb 'smart' devices with a select handful of 'strategic' integrations within their pay-walled garden."

For Internet of Things applications to work, device vendors need to provide open APIs so that other developers can hack services around and into them.

If APAC developers do this, they'll win the war. Again, the battle won't be won by building nice devices. It will be won by creating compelling developer cloud-services experiences that span a wide array of devices—all of which can start with open APIs on those devices so that developers, both within APAC and outside it, can hack the future.

App developers are a pragmatic bunch, spending their time wherever they believe the biggest paycheck will hit. While that used to be the desktop, nearly half the global developer population is now focused on building mobile applications. True to form, these developers aren't necessarily chasing consumer applications, but instead are skewing their efforts to more assured revenue channels like enterprise development, as a new Evans Data developer survey suggests.

Mobile Is Eating The Developer Population

According to Evans Data's recently released Developer Population and Demographics Study, of the 19 million software developers in the world, 8.7 million are now writing apps targeted for mobile devices. That number becomes even more impressive when we consider that the mobile developer population has doubled since 2010 and added 700,000 new developers in 2013.

With smartphone shipments booming and showing no signs of abating their pace—as Mary Meeker's Internet Trends 2014 report details—expect the mobile developer population to grow in tandem.

Where are these developers? Regionally, Asia-Pacific region leads with about 46% more developers focused on mobile than the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region, which includes Russia. Latin America lags behind those regions and North America in its mobile developer population.

And who are they? Here's some good news: the number of female developers has boomed by 87% since 2001, totaling nearly 3.5 million developers today, a significant percentage of which targets mobile.

Boring, Profitable Enterprise Development

More women. More developers in Asia-Pacific. And ... more enterprise app development.

People who think that mobile developers are only developers who sell apps through app stores are seeing just a small part of the overall picture. Mobile development is becoming ubiquitous thanks to the prominence of mobile devices as the preferred client in both enterprise and consumer environments.

So, if they're not writing the next Flappy Bird (incidentally, built by a developer in Vietnam), what are these developers writing? Boring, safe enterprise apps.

Building mobile apps for the enterprise is not exactly a new trend. In the past two years, many mobile developer have seen the enterprise as a more stable source of revenue, with a ton of room to grow. As I've written before, enterprise developers stand to make four times as much money building mobile apps than consumer-oriented developers do, according to research from VisionMobile.

This shift is having a multiplier effect on mobile developers' paychecks. If you multiply the average revenue per developer by the average size of development team for mobile and enterprise application development, using VisionMobile's data, enterprise-oriented development teams make 16-times more revenue than consumer-oriented development teams.

Death Of The Consumer?

Consumer apps aren't dead. Not by a longshot. While the future belongs to mobile app developers, and those developers are likely to skew enterprise in order to pay their rent, we're not going to see an evaporation of interest in building consumer apps. While desktop development favored dullsville enterprise apps for decades, plenty of games and other consumer-oriented apps still got written.

The more interesting story, however, is the kind of consumer and enterprise applications that will be built. With more women joining the mobile developer workforce, it's likely that we'll see a different flavor of both consumer and enterprise apps.

The same is true of the heavy balance of APAC developers, particularly in China. While we tend to laud the pace and innovation of Silicon Valley, I spoke recently to a veteran of Silicon Valley startups who just returned from nine years in Beijing, where he started and sold a few companies. According to him, China's startup economy puts Silicon Valley to shame in both its level of competition and how hard people are willing to work to win. Chinese mobile entrepreneurs have innovated both on the business model side, as The Wall Street Journal has reported, but also in technical innovation.

In other words, mobile puts very different developer populations to work and we're likely to get an incredibly diverse, rich mobile ecosystem as a result.

Such demeaning glorifications of so-called brogramming culture are curious in light of a new Evans Data survey that indicates that the vast majority of developers are married, middle-aged, have two to three children, and most likely have a mortgage. Are these guys jerks at home, too?

Developer Demographics: Not A Frat House In Sight

Usually when we think of "brogrammers," we picture Silicon Valley hipsters that may have graduated from college, but can't leave the frat house behind. The reality, according to Evans Data survey of more than 1,400 programmers, is somewhat different.

For one thing, while popular culture celebrates the idea of developers as pizza-eating loners, the data suggests otherwise. According to Evans Data, 71% of developers are married and only 3% are divorced (compared to a 40% divorce rate nationwide). Roughly 68% of developers have between one to three children. Only 32% are childless. Most developers are married with children.

Not surprisingly, then, most developers aren't particularly young. Of the 18.2 million programmers on the planet, most left college long ago. While the median age has been falling for years, in North America the median age is still a reasonably stodgy 36.

Lastly, while brogrammer culture is rightly derided as juvenile, it apparently has flourished among a highly educated workforce. We may celebrate the dropouts like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, but 85% of developers have college degrees, 40% have Master's degrees and another 5% have doctoral degrees.

In other words, developers should know better.

A Rising Tide Sinks All Boats?

Maybe the problem is more nuanced. As the chart below shows, the recession in 2007 may have taken a serious toll on older software developers in the U.S., introducing a much younger developer demographic. As Janel Garvin, CEO of Evans Data, posits, "U.S. workforces downsized and older developers went into retirement (either voluntarily or not). At the same time, the popularity of mobile devices blossomed, capturing the imagination of younger people who began writing mobile apps."

Is it these younger developers who are to blame?

Growing Out Of Brogramming

Maybe. Of course, among 18.2 million developers, it's not surprising that some would be idiots, including married idiots with kids.

What is surprising is that we tolerate them. But maybe it's just a numbers game.

Evans Data finds that men comprise 86% of the global developer population, or 15.7 million people. In a crowd that large, it's as easy to assume you can get away with sexist remarks as it is to let them go, assuming someone else will take the bozos to task for their misogynistic behavior.

The good news is that more people have been willing to publicly shame the Titstare developers of the world. As web and mobile developer Gina Trapani writes, the companies that shelter or embrace brogramming culture will lose the best talent:

Brogrammer culture celebrates frat house values, youth over experience and men over women. In the war for hiring great talent, the companies that embrace this culture rather than reject it will lose. That's a good thing.

It's a very good thing, indeed. I just hope male developers' families will also hold them to this higher standard.

Apparently, native apps have won. We even said so right here on ReadWrite. After all, Facebook apparently likes native more.

Unfortunately, CIOs missed the memo, and the dirty little secret is that most of the world's software, including apps, is written for use, not sale. That means that most of the world's software is not going to follow what Facebook's mobile strategy is, but rather what those stodgy enterprises do.

Those stodgy enterprises? They're all in on HTML5.

I spent Wednesday afternoon with a who's who of enterprise CIOs and CTOs in New York City, talking about Big Data, cloud and mobile. With the Facebook Phone in mind, I polled the group on its mobile applications. Every single executive - not one exception - was building hybrid HTML5 apps, meaning the bulk of the app is written in HTML5 with a native wrapper to improve performance, add camera access, etc.

Every. Single. One.

And not just a few such apps. The bulk of their apps were hybrid HTML5 apps, both for internal employees and for external customers.

Going Native?

Sure, there were some native apps, though generally not yet written for Android. ("We can't figure out what to do about Android," said one executive of a major financial services firm.) But overall, the CIOs I talked to, and there were roughly 100 in the room, were basing their mobile app strategy on hybrid HTML5 apps.

The CIO needs are different from Zynga's, or those of other consumer app developers. Many of the apps they're building are informational in nature, or have such a stringent need for broad access that these enterprises simply can't afford to alienate a particular mobile device demographic. They need to support iOS, Android, Windows, Blackberry, etc. And with the vast majority of mobile OSes now sporting HTML5-compatible browsers, the time is ripe for HTML5 apps.

Still Hiring For HTML5

The job numbers bear this out. While HTML5 can get pooh-poohed by consumer app developers like Facebook, it remains the hottest technology skill, as measured by jobs, more than holding its own with iOS and Android in absolute number of jobs:

And trouncing both iOS and Android in terms of relative job growth:

This corroborates Evans Data's finding in early 2012 that 75% of mobile developers were using or expecting to use HTML5, a number that seems to have moved from aspirational to actual in 2013.

Hence, while the media will tend to focus on what it knows best - consumer apps - CIOs are working away on HTML5 strategies. Just ask Accenture. Yes, there are tradeoffs when going HTML5, just as there are tradeoffs when going native. For enterprise CIOs, however, broad, cross-platform access to employees and customers makes HTML5 a winning solution.

You can be forgiven for writing off Microsoft's mobile future. Given that Apple's operating income for its iPhone and iPad devices nearly surpasses Microsoft's total revenue, or that Google's Android market share makes Windows Mobile's share look like a rounding error, it's easy to disregard Microsoft's chances in mobile. That is, unless you're a CIO. Within the enterprise, CIOs continue to rate Microsoft above all other vendors, giving Microsoft some breathing room.

The question is, how much?

The CIO's Pick

Microsoft's Windows Mobile doesn't show up in IDC's latest numbers. While IDC declares that Windows Phone/Windows Mobile made "market-beating" progress in the fourth quarter of 2012, with sales of Windows-based smartphones up 400% year over year, Android and iOS still combined to claim 87% of the 722 million smartphones shipped globally in 2012. Microsoft's share? Just 3%, according to Gartner.

Yet in Piper Jaffray's quarterly CIO Survey released last week, a full 45% of CIOs picked Microsoft as their most indispensable "mega-vendor." This may not sound like much, but the second-place vendor, Oracle, got half as many CIO votes. The next few vendors include SAP, Cisco, IBM, EMC, Hewlett-Packard and Apple, which got a mere 4%. The reports authors note:

CIOs state that 'there are really no alternatives to Microsoft. [Others said] 'MS services are getting better and will allow us to move more to the cloud,' and 'we are highly invested in their technologies and dependent on them extending their platforms.'

We believe Microsoft's dominance in the enterprise is underappreciated, and some of the threats against Microsoft, such as alternatives to the Windows desktop OS in the enterprise or productivity software, may be over-hyped in the near term. That said, keep in mind that our CIO survey does not address the large consumer business for Microsoft, which faces much more intense competitive pressures than its enterprise business.

In other words, whatever CIOs may want to buy, their employees are purchasing iOS and Android devices in droves.

Even so, developer interest in the Windows platform may yet save Microsoft.

Sexiest Nun In The Mega-Vendor Convent

Despite its stumbles in mobile, developers continue to hold out hope. At least, developers of a certain age and vocation. According to a new Evans Data developer survey, Microsoft was picked as having "top relevance" among two-thirds of the 450 surveyed, and claimed the top spot among 90% of developers aged 46-50. Google came in second, and was listed as the mobile company set to dominate within three years. Apple? It came in fifth.

I’m not surprised Microsoft is big with an older generation of developers, but what does that tell you? They’re sticking with a platform they’re comfortable with and hoping Microsoft hits it big. I’d be surprised if any of these developers who say they’re big on Microsoft or Android are not also supporting Apple. They have to be if they want to make any money.

But among the enterprise mega-vendors, the few companies that control the vast majority of enterprise IT budgets, Microsoft tops the field as showing the most leadership in mobile among these same survey respondents:

Source: Appcelerator, 2013

This may not seem like a big deal ("Sexiest nun in the convent"), but given that 73% of enterprises have developed and deployed fewer than five applications, the mobile enterprise is still wide open. Keeping in mind Microsoft's clout with CIOs, even Microsoft's anemic 28% "leadership" rating could be enough to pave its way to significant traction within the enterprise.

Redmond's Fighting Chance

All that said, the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) phenomenon has largely rendered CIO edicts as to device preferences futile. IT has become an order-taker, rather than an order-giver, with regard to mobile devices. Microsoft may be cool with the suits, but it has yet to demonstrate that it can turn the heads of mobile developers.

Even so, it's too soon to count out Microsoft's mobile hopes. Not while it retains such fealty from enterprise CIOs and developers. With Microsoft CFO Peter Klein suggesting that Microsoft is closing in on "write once, run anywhere" cross-platform capability for Windows 8 to run across a wide array of form factors, which would allow the enterprise to have its cake (Windows desktop development) and eat it, too (Windows mobile devices), Microsoft's enterprise value proposition may be too tempting to ignore.